Hamas: Made in the U.S.A.
https://www.nationalreview.com/2023/11/hamas-made-in-the-u-s-a/?bypass_key=S2YxRFQ0K2dtOTFGWGRzczZkRWphUT09OjpNVE53V2xGTlRHbHBMMWh1YW5GelNHMUVMMjk1WnowOQ%3D%3DLeft: Mousa Abu Marzook in 1999. Right: Pro-Palestinian students take part in a protest at Columbia University in New York City, October 12, 2023. (Khaled Al Hariri, Jeenah Moon/Reuters)
By ANDREW C. MCCARTHY
November 25, 2023 6:30 AM
Antisemitic terror has deep, surprising roots in American soil.
After the jihadist barbarities of October 7, Israel responded with aerial bombardments of Hamas havens in Gaza, in preparation for the now-ongoing ground invasion. As the bombs fell, Hamas heavyweight Mousa Abu Marzook was asked about the elaborate network of tunnels that the organization has built under the territory it has governed since being popularly elected in 2006. It is a virtual underground city stretching over 300 miles, constructed with untold billions of dollars in foreign-aid money diverted for the purpose (not to be confused with the aid money diverted to make billionaires out of Marzook and his fellow Hamas emirs).
Since Hamas has built tunnels instead of bomb shelters, the friendly Russia Today TV reporter wondered, why doesn’t it just let Gazans use the tunnels to shelter from Israeli attacks?
Marzook’s answer was chillingly matter-of-fact. The tunnels were not built for so-called civilians; they were built for the jihadists:
We have built the tunnels because we have no other way of protecting ourselves from being targeted and killed. These tunnels are meant to protect us from the airplanes. We are fighting from inside the tunnels.
Of course Marzook (sometimes spelled “Mazouk” or “Marzuq”) is not fighting from inside a tunnel. He was speaking from his posh offices in Qatar. There, he and the rest of Hamas’s “politburo” are harbored and abetted by the Muslim Brotherhood regime in Doha that President Biden — building on the Obama–Biden administration’s empowerment of Qatar, despite its record of material support to jihadists — has formally denominated a “major non-NATO ally” of the United States. Hamas has been formally designated as a terrorist organization under U.S. law since 1994, yet the Obama–Biden administration greenlit the establishment of a Hamas headquarters in Doha in 2012 — just as it similarly greenlit the establishment of a Taliban headquarters that Qatar, of course, was delighted to host.
Remember, “Either you are with us, or you are with the terrorists”? Twenty-two years ago seems like an alternative universe now.
The notion that Hamas has a strictly political operation siloed from its jihadist operations has always been as absurd as the conceit, similarly popular among transnational progressives, that anti-Zionism is just a political stance, unconnected to hateful antisemitism. Marzook has been at the center of both fictions since the 1987 establishment of Hamas, the Palestinian branch of the Muslim Brotherhood.
In Doha, the native of Gaza has landed softly, as ever, after bouncing from Amman to Damascus to Cairo. Following his faraway treks these last three decades, one almost forgets that it was in the United States that he helped forge Hamas — and even ran it for a time.
The Brotherhood’s Lifeblood Is the Campus
I recounted Marzook’s exploits in The Grand Jihad, my 2010 book about the partnership between the political Left and the Brotherhood — the most successful global sharia-supremacist movement in modern history. (The Brotherhood, which has numerous satellite organizations, is frequently referred to as the Ikhwan — shorthand for Jamā’at al-Ikhwān al-Mulismūn, the Society of the Muslim Brothers. It was established in Egypt after the collapse of the Ottoman Caliphate in 1924.) While I’d love to take credit for as perfect a description of the Brotherhood’s sharia-supremacist project as “the grand jihad,” it is perfect because it comes directly from the Brotherhood itself. The phrase appears in an internal Brotherhood memorandum, which was central to the Justice Department’s eventual terrorism-financing prosecution of the Holy Land Foundation for Relief and Development — the “charity” that served as Hamas’s American piggy bank.
In the memo, expounding on its mission in the United States, Marzook’s confederate, Mohamed Akram, wrote:
The Ikwhan must understand that their work in America is a kind of grand jihad in eliminating and destroying the Western civilization from within and “sabotaging” its miserable house by their hands [i.e., the Westerners’ own hands] and the hands of the believers so that it is eliminated and God’s religion is made victorious over all other religions.
Those words were written in 1991. By then, Marzook had been at this civilizational jihad in America for a decade.
The Brotherhood is a movement that sprang from universities and has always catalyzed campus radicalism. Its two most formative figures, founder Hassan al-Banna and his successor Sayyid Qutb, were academics. The Brotherhood’s guiding jurisprudent in the modern era, Sheikh Yusuf al-Qaradawi, was a scholar at al-Azar University, the center of Sunni Islamic scholarship for over a millennium. So was another Brotherhood eminence, Sheikh Omar Abdel Rahman (dubbed “the Emir of Jihad”), whom I prosecuted in the early-to-mid-Nineties, and whose students’ movement (Gama’at al Islamiyya, the Islamic Group) was principally responsible for murdering Egyptian president Anwar Sadat in 1981 over the peace he’d made with Israel.
Like most members, Marzook found the Brotherhood on campus, becoming active as an engineering student in Abu Dhabi during the Seventies. Ostensibly, it was to pursue an industrial-engineering doctorate at Columbia State University in Louisiana that he came to the United States in the late 1970s. That was over a decade after the Brotherhood stood up the first chapters of its most consequential building block in the West, the Muslim Students Association (MSA).
You’ve been aghast at the Dionysian exhibitions of Jew hatred on American campuses for the past seven weeks? You shouldn’t be so shocked. It’s been happening unimpeded right before our eyes for, now, 60 years.
MSA chapters indoctrinate young Muslims — and those they, in turn, influence — in sharia-supremacism, particularly the writings of Banna, Qutb, and Qaradawi. Needless to say, until his death last year, Qaradawi was harbored in Qatar, also — of course — home to the Islamist propaganda outlet Al Jazeera, which for years broadcast the sheikh’s weekly Sharia and Life program to audiences in the tens of millions. Antisemitism is a leitmotif of this oeuvre, seamlessly interwoven with progressive academia’s anti-Western, anti-Zionist, anti-white polemics against “colonialism,” “oppression,” and “systemic racism.”
Starting with just a few chapters in the Midwest (the first at the University of Illinois Urbana-Champaign in 1963), the MSA now boasts chapters (often more than one) at hundreds of universities across the United States and Canada — such that it’s really not that tough to rustle up over 30 organizations at Harvard to blame Israel for the atrocities perpetrated on Israelis by Hamas. And if you’re wondering how you end up with 300,000 pro-Hamas demonstrators on the streets of London on the very day England reserves for the honoring of its war dead, the answer is the Brotherhood’s American model. In 1984, the Muslim Students Association of Europe was founded in Madrid. In short order, it became the plinth for the Federation of Islamic Organizations in Europe, a hive for Brotherhood groups throughout the continent.
That’s exactly what had previously happened in the United States.
Marzook Builds the Brotherhood’s American Empire
Back in the Seventies, the Saudi government was playing the role now largely assumed by Qatar, bankrolling the Brotherhood’s proselytism. (This was four decades before the Brotherhood’s so-called Arab Spring revolts and the brutal war in Syria ruptured the Saudi–Brotherhood alliance.) In 1973, the Saudis and their Brotherhood partners at the MSA created the North American Islamic Trust (NAIT), which set about investing in (i.e., assuming control of) the lion’s share of American mosques and associated Islamic centers — the centers that Qutb envisioned as the “axis” of the movement to spread sharia’s dominion.
By 1981, the consolidation of influence in the mosques and on campus had proved so successful, the Brotherhood conceived of a new organization, which would serve simultaneously as an MSA graduate program and an umbrella structure “to advance the cause of Islam and service Muslims in North America so [as] to enable them to adopt Islam as a complete way of life.” Thus was born the Islamic Society of North America (ISNA).
ISNA is now the largest Muslim organization in the United States, and thus efforts to airbrush its history — including, to my chagrin, in National Review — are legion. But facts are facts. ISNA emerged from the MSA like Athena from the head of Zeus. It was incorporated at the same address as the MSA and NAIT. On its website, ISNA has frequently claimed to have been created in 1963 (the year of the MSA’s establishment, 18 years before ISNA’s). And an internal Brotherhood memo relates that the MSA “was developed into the Islamic Society of North America to include all Muslim congregations of immigrants and citizens, and to be a nucleus for the Islamic movement in North America.” For its part, NAIT acknowledged that it provided “protection and safeguarding for the assets of ISNA/MSA.”
ISNA chafes at this history because it resulted in the organization’s being identified, along with NAIT and other Brotherhood satellites, as an unindicted coconspirator in the notorious scheme to back Hamas’s anti-Israeli intifada with millions of dollars. But let’s not get ahead of ourselves.
In 1981, the same year ISNA also debuted in the Midwest, Chicago was the locus for the Brotherhood’s establishment of the Islamic Association of Palestine (IAP). The trailblazer for IAP was Marzook, then 30, in collaboration with another STEM student, Sami al-Arian. A budding computer engineer born in Kuwait to Palestinian refugees, al-Arian would ultimately become a top leader in Palestinian Islamic Jihad while holding down a professorship in computer engineering at the University of South Florida (having earned his doctorate at North Carolina State University). According to the Turkish-American scholar Zeyno Baran, Marzook and al-Arian worked in consultation with Khaled Mashal, a prodigy who joined the Brotherhood at 15 while (naturally) a student in Kuwait — and who, years later, would succeed Marzook as Hamas’s leader because Marzook was stuck in U.S. federal prison.
Coddled by Marzook’s American Brotherhood Network, Hamas Is Born
The IAP was an unabashed Brotherhood organ, declaring its purpose to be communicating the Ikhwan point of view and championing “Palestine” in the arenas of politics and public opinion. It also became the essential support platform for the jihad against Israel when the Brotherhood created Hamas — whose name is an acronym roughly derived from Harakat al-Muqawamah al-Isamiyya, the Islamic Resistance Movement.
For decades, even prior to Israel’s 1948 War of Independence, jihadists had savagely resisted the presence of Jews in the ancestral Jewish homeland (as Sol Stern relates in an essential Commentary essay). But by the Eighties, “the resistance” was dominated by Yasser Arafat’s Palestine Liberation Organization (PLO). Its tactical nods to radical Islam notwithstanding, the PLO had a Marxist bent (to say nothing of its notorious corruption), and thus coexisted uneasily with the Brotherhood and its sharia supremacism. Hamas would be the vehicle by which the Brotherhood would seize control — very lucrative control — of the “struggle against occupation.”
In late December 1987, fighting broke out in Gaza when a tragic car accident, in which four Palestinians lost their lives, was distorted by agitators, who portrayed it as an intentional killing to avenge the recent murder of an Israeli. In the resulting revolt, Hamas was formally established by two longtime Brotherhood activists: Ahmed Yassin, a blind paraplegic bestowed the honorific “Sheikh” although he had not completed his studies, and Abdel Azziz al-Rantisi, a medical doctor who — need I say it? — joined the Brotherhood while at university in Alexandria, Egypt. By 1988, as the first intifada raged, Hamas had issued its infamous charter, which pledges it to Israel’s destruction by violent jihad, assertedly as an Islamic duty.
Once Hamas was established, its support became the preeminent mission of the Brotherhood globally, and especially of Marzook in America. He sprang his U.S.-based network into action, forming the “Palestine Committee” under the auspices of the IAP, as both a fundraising arm and a vehicle for imposing order and direction on the surge of pro-Hamas initiatives from various Brotherhood components.
These exertions included Marzook’s provision of $200,000 in seed money for the creation of the “Occupied Land Fund,” which in time morphed into the Holy Land Foundation for Relief and Development. The HLF operated from within ISNA and NAIT, which kept an HLF account into which were deposited checks payable to “the Palestinian Mujahideen” — a reference to Hamas’s military wing. Years later, when it became the subject of the Justice Department’s most significant federal terrorism-financing prosecution, the HLF was proved to have raised over $12 million for Hamas.
There was a vital piece missing from the Brotherhood’s U.S. infrastructure, however: a public champion wily in the ways of American law and media.
As the first intifada raged from 1987 through 1993, and Hamas emerged as the jihad’s hard edge, a new Democratic administration made its bed with Arafat in the quest for the holy grail: the “two-state solution” that Palestinians have never wanted, and the prospect of which they are reared from birth to regard as a betrayal of Allah. As “peace partner,” Arafat paid lip-service to the “renunciation of terrorism” and “Israel’s right to exist,” but never backed up his words with much meaningful action. It was enough, though, to persuade President Clinton to strengthen Arafat’s hand against his Hamas rival. New federal laws were enacted, under which Hamas was formally designated as a terrorist organization, such that material support to it was criminalized and its fundraising channels could be dammed.
Hamas’s principal supporters, under the auspices of Marzook’s IAP, were thus imperiled. They were known abettors of the jihad, and their labors could now land them in federal prison. “We are marked,” one fretted at a 1993 Brotherhood confab in Philadelphia, secretly recorded by the FBI.
The solution, they decided, was to establish a less “conspicuous” cheerleader with a clean slate, one that would combine what HLF leader Shukri Abu-Bakr called “a media twinkle” with an emotive commitment to civil rights — the better to obscure its jihadist sympathies in vaporous odes to “social justice,” “due process,” and “resistance.” Because “war is deception,” the Philadelphia conferees agreed, the organization would need to speak with a forked tongue — offering a message that would seem benign to the “American . . . who doesn’t know anything” while resonating with “the Palestinian who has a martyr brother,” as Nihad Awad, the IAP’s then-public-relations director, explained.
Thus did Marzook’s Brotherhood network birth the Council on American-Islamic Relations, CAIR, which made its first official appearance in 1994. It has since become the American media’s go-to source for sharia-supremacist apologetics. Awad, a Palestinian from Jordan, was placed in charge and is to this day CAIR’s executive director. Seed money was poured in by Marzook and HLF. CAIR would return the favor many times over, not only serving as Hamas’s “civil rights” advocate but also helping HLF raise funds.
Running Hamas . . . from Virginia
It is not enough, though, to say Hamas was bankrolled from the United States in its early days, as it sought to destroy Israel by force. Hamas was also run from the United States.
In 1989, Sheikh Yassin was arrested by Israeli authorities. At that point, Marzook was named head of the Hamas political bureau. For three years during the First Intifada, Marzook ran Hamas from his Virginia home. From that perch, he not only oversaw fundraising but coordinated forcible attacks as well as the recruitment and training of Hamas operatives on American soil. In 1992, Marzook moved closer to the action, relocating to Jordan where he remained until the Clinton administration induced King Hussein to expel him despite the resulting Palestinian unrest.
It should go without saying in this sordid story that Marzook had earned U.S. lawful-permanent-resident-alien status in the years during which he built the Brotherhood’s American network and led Hamas. With that seeming ace in the hole, Marzook calculated that the Americans could not prevent him from returning to his family in Virginia. But for once, he guessed wrong: He was arrested at Kennedy Airport in New York City in July 1995, his name flagged on a terrorism watch-list. Israel pressed its American ally to detain Marzook while it sought his extradition to face trial for a slew of terrorist atrocities. He was thus held in federal prison for 22 months.
The Peace Process Helps the Jihadist Slip the Noose
In a 1996 opinion rejecting one of Marzook’s many challenges to detention and extradition, the late judge Kevin Thomas Duffy — who had earlier tried the first World Trade Center bombing case in Manhattan federal court — summarized some of Marzook’s alleged trail of carnage:
(1) the bombing at a beach in Tel Aviv on July 28, 1990, which killed a Canadian tourist; (2) the stabbing deaths of three civilians working in a factory in Jaffa on December 14, 1990; (3) the January 1, 1992, shooting death of a civilian as he drove his car in Kfar Darom in Gaza; (4) the shooting death of a civilian as he drove his car in the Beit La’hiah region of Gaza on May 17, 1992; (5) the stabbing deaths of two civilians working at a packing plant in Sajaeya on June 25, 1992; (6) the gun-fire attack by three persons of a passenger bus in Jerusalem on July 1, 1993, in which two civilians were killed and others were injured; (7) the bombing of a passenger bus in Afula on April 6, 1994, which killed eight civilians and injured forty-six; (
the bombing of a passenger bus in Hadera on April 13, 1994, which killed four civilians and injured twelve; (9) the machinegun attack in a pedestrian mall in Jerusalem on October 9, 1994, which killed one civilian and injured eighteen; and (10) the bombing of a bus in Tel Aviv on October 19, 1994, which killed twenty-two civilians and injured forty-six.
Marzook laughably contended both that the Hamas political bureau he led was walled off from the organization’s forcible operations, and that the latter operations were nevertheless “political” rather than criminal — a claim Judge Duffy curtly rebuffed, pointing out that terrorist crimes against humanity cannot be immunized as mere political acts.
Marzook’s legal arguments were meritless, but he has always had an exquisite sense of timing.
In autumn 1996, after an outbreak of deadly fighting and under pressure from the Clinton administration to revive the flagging Oslo “peace process,” the newly elected Israeli prime minister, Benjamin Netanyahu, agreed to restart negotiations, mediated by Jordan’s King Hussein in conjunction with Clinton’s emissaries. Recognizing this as a sensitive moment — when, if he actually were tried for Hamas’s rampages in Israel, it could stir Palestinian outrage and disrupt the negotiations — Marzook suddenly dropped his objection to extradition. Flummoxed, Israel announced that it no longer sought to try him, despite having for a year and a half pressured the Clinton Justice Department to detain him in the teeth of protest by the Brotherhood’s array of American satellite organizations.
It is not enough to say that, at that point, there were abundant grounds for a U.S. prosecution that could, then and there, have put an end to Marzook’s jihadist career. Marzook was eventually indicted by the Bush Justice Department in 2002 — i.e., only after the 9/11 attacks had roused Americans into dull awareness that our country had for decades been fueling the jihad even as it turned its fire on us.
Alas, by then Marzook was long gone. Once Israel declined prosecution of its nemesis, Clinton washed his hands of Marzook, now pressuring Jordan to take him back less than two years after demanding that Jordan expel him. In the dead of night in May 1997, Marzook was flown from New York to Amman. He had agreed not to contest the terrorism allegations, which effectively forfeited his green-card status. While American and Israeli officials tried to spin this as a win, the Hamas emir was welcomed back to the region as a victor.
Though Hamas’s leaders have become multi-billionaires skimming off the jihad, it’s an uncertain life. But Marzook has a remarkable way of landing on his feet. Sprung from American imprisonment, safely out of U.S. jurisdiction, he evaded prosecution in the above-mentioned 2002 Texas case and, later, in the 2008 HLF prosecution — in which ISNA, NAIT, and CAIR were all named as unindicted coconspirators. They stayed unindicted. Despite convictions of several defendants and a mountain of evidence, by the next year the new, Brotherhood-friendly Obama–Biden administration was in power — with President Obama’s top adviser, Valerie Jarrett, keynoting the annual ISNA convention.
Meanwhile, Marzook was booted from Jordan to Syria when the vaunted “peace process” inevitably imploded. He subsequently made his way to Cairo, but the Arab Spring proved exceptionally hot when Egyptians ousted the new Brotherhood government upon just a small taste of what it would actually be like.
So now Marzook has found safe haven in the Brotherhood’s alter ego, the sharia-supremacist regime of Qatar. There, while Doha barters savagely abducted Israeli hostages — including toddlers — for concessions to Hamas, Marzook snidely explains that the tunnels in Gaza, built by diverting billions in foreign aid, are for jihadist warfare, not civilian shelter.
Many wonder at how, after funding and harboring Hamas for years, Qatar could be rewarded by the Biden administration with “Major Non-NATO Ally” status and all its attendant perks. Mousa Abu Marzook does not wonder. Having built the Muslim Brotherhood’s American empire, which has flooded urban centers and campus quads with unabashed Hamas supporters; having launched Hamas in gusts of American fundraising; and having run the Brotherhood’s Palestinian jihad for years from his Virginia home, Marzook can only smirk.
